# \[bounty\] Google+ (private ) communities: export screenscraper + importer

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/bounty-google-private-communities-export-screenscraper-importer/108029
**Category:** Marketplace
**Created:** [January 31, 2019, 3:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bounty-google-private-communities-export-screenscraper-importer/108029 "2019-01-31T15:40:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 25

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![mcdanlj](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mcdanlj/32/131829_2.png) [@mcdanlj](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcdanlj)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 5:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bounty-google-private-communities-export-screenscraper-importer/108029/25 "2019-02-26T17:43:03Z")

</div>

Thanks @pfaffman !

I see `where().first` is more idiomatic Ruby than my Python-inspired `[0]` later on, and lack of `.first` is why my error checking for `nil?` would never fire even when categories didn’t exist. That I can fix.

Google has UUIDs for categories, so now I know that I could use `import_id` if I want to import new categories. For my current purposes, I actually want the categories to have been created and organized first because I’m back-filling. I could make a conditional for whether to create category or error on unknown category, depending on whether it would actually be used. If someone asks, that looks not hard. I probably won’t bother unless someone here says they would actually use it, though. Google+ category names are in practice often long and would make the Discourse UI look a little off, so I think in this case it’s likely to be worth the effort up front. Or, if you are going to run some of these imports on a professional basis, happy to hand off to you for that!

Does providing the G+-provided UUID when creating a topic/post mean that as long as I’m providing the same UUID, `create_post` will see that it exists on the system and not re-create it? If so, that would make the script safe to run for incremental imports, which would be awesome!

Actual current version of my script:

> <https://github.com/johnsonm/discourse/blob/friendsmegplus/script/import_scripts/friendsmegplus.rb>

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bounty-google-private-communities-export-screenscraper-importer/108029)._